Designed in California and hand-made in Mexico, Beek is a brand dedicated to creating footwear that is both beautiful and comfortable. Crafted with time and care using only the softest vegetable-tanned leather, Beek features wonderful footwear that you can live in, would love to be in, and one that only gets better with age. Beek has the perfect footwear for traveling the world, or just going on about your day.
What Beek offers is more than just the most timeless, feminine, luxurious, and comfortable shoes on the market. The brand has other important missions: to help end childhood hunger in the United States and to keep and improve its sustainability practices.
Since the brand launched in 2015, they focused its efforts, time, and money on helping feed at-risk children in the US. For every pair of Beek shoes sold, they donate the equivalent of five meals, for a child in need, through the Childhood Hunger Strategy with the Second Harvest Food Bank.
The leather they use is much more sustainable than polyurethane (PU), which is 100% plastic - made from either petroleum byproducts or “natural gas,” both of which are fossil fuels and bad for the environment. Hence they use leather that is degradable, recyclable, and exclusively a byproduct of cattle and sheep raised for meat. It’s better for the environment to use this leather than to dispose of the hides. Their all-leather construction (50% of their collection) uses only vegetable-tanned leathers, the most sustainable method available. It comes from tanneries gold-certified by the Leather Working Group (LWG), and only 14 tanneries in Mexico have achieved this certification. The TPR heel piece is 100% recyclable. The wrapped leather construction is about 50% sustainable (memory foam, unfortunately, cannot be recycled) with an outsole that’s 100% recyclable and 40% recycled. The soft leather in which they wrap their footbeds requires a different tanning process, but it’s degradable and recyclable.
As for packaging, all of their carton and box materials are recycled, except for the wax coating on the lining and tissue, which is necessary to prevent dusting onto the shoes. As for transportation, Beek uses no cargo ships and very little air freight so their carbon footprint is solely from trucking in from nearby Mexico (about 5% shipping from overseas).
Beek cares about the artisans who their shoes. The working conditions in their factories are well on their way to achieving Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP) certification. They’re already 75% there and looking to be 100% by 2024.
